Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin... And How to Bring It Back

by David Stockman

  That Donald Trump has chosen to pound the tables on this issue is indicative of his dangerous penchant for reality TV theatrics and his fundamental confusion between courageous and honest political leadership and further aggrandizement of an already overly strong central state.

  Under any sound notion of federalism, in fact, community policing is a function for local and state governments, not the grandees and pooh-bahs of the Beltway.

  Even were the crime rate stats not so dramatically favorable, full-throated demagoguery in behalf of America’s police forces should have no place in a presidential campaign; and, more importantly, there is no reason whatsoever for Washington to even be involved in legislating criminal law and the operational machinery of its enforcement.

  To the contrary, the places where most of the nation’s violent crimes and assaults on law enforcement officers actually occur—a few dozen large urban areas—have not been helped by the Federal government at all. They have actually been put in harm’s way.

  Indeed, when viewed in longer-term prospective it is evident that the two pulses of gun-related police deaths in the last century were caused by Washington’s follies—first Prohibition in the 1920s and then the federal “War on Drugs” incepting the 1970s.

  To wit, abolish the federal “War on Drugs” entirely and turn the distribution of all currently banned “controlled substances” over to Phillip Morris and other law-abiding purveyors of legal poisons and a good share of even the criminal violence we do have would eventually disappear. And that would especially be true if the prisons and jails were emptied of drug users and traffickers.

  That’s because in its infinite folly, the federal government and its state and local fellow travelers have incarcerated upwards of 1.0 million drug law offenders on the grounds that they are being punished while society is being protected.

  That’s balderdash. Society doesn’t need any protection from vending machines, sidewalk emporiums or other legal forms of commerce that could readily distribute any drugs, which today are controlled by violent globe-spanning cartels and the vicious underground distribution networks they operate in local communities.

  Likewise, the bulging prisons and jails full of drug offenders are not punishing anyone. To the contrary, they are taxpayer-funded trade schools for criminals.

  In short, eliminate the federal drug and seizure laws and segue the drug business to the tobacco companies, banks and Colorado-style pot entrepreneurs and the trend in the chart below would head even closer towards zero per 100,000.

  In fact, hugging the zero bound is exactly where this rate stands in England and numerous other outposts of civilization.

  As to the other side of the coin, the cops in America are at once way over-militarized, and also way over-mandated with the enforcement of nanny- state laws that give them too many excuses to exercise lethal force against citizens. Very simply put, get them out of narcotics, prostitution, gambling and related social control missions and they will kill far fewer people. Furthermore, take back their armored vehicles and other military gear and they will have far fewer Rambo-tendencies.

  Even then, excessive police use of force and unjustifiable killings are not a national epidemic, and do not require heavy-handed federal intervention. As the FBI computes it, the annual number of so-called “justifiable homicides” by police officers has been relatively constant at around 400 per year for nearly three decades.

  Even if the above numbers are suspect because the characterization as “justifiable” is largely police determined and reported, the chart below does not remotely justify the nightly derby of purported police violence by two of the most gullible empty suits in cable journalism—Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon of CNN.

  Half the time they have the story wrong because purported “innocent victims” weren’t all that, such as the Michael Brown case in Ferguson. Besides, the liberal media narrative vastly exaggerates the facts and fails to point out that if there is any fault to be ascribed, it is to the local sheriffs, police chiefs and city governments that are not doing their job of managing and disciplining the law enforcement officers under their command.

  If Donald Trump must engage on an issue that isn’t even among the “Top 10” imperatives with regard to cleaning the stables in the Imperial City let him heap a fusillade of tweets at the real culprits like Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago.

  Even when more objective and broader measures of police use of fatal force are considered, the cable reality news narrative doesn’t really hold up.

  The highest numbers reported are from a private tracking project called “Fatal Encounters.” The number of civilian deaths by police for the 28 states for which there is “complete” data appears to have risen from about 350 annually in the year 2000 to 700 at present. But the problem with this version is that it makes no effort to distinguish between justifiable use of police firearms against threatening criminals and civilian killings, which should have never happened.

  At the end of the day, the overwhelming message of the data is that there is neither crime wave nor eruption of police violence on either the giving or receiving end. Donald Trump is on a wild goose chase, yet it is precisely one that unwittingly serves the ferocious campaign of the ruling elites to discredit his candidacy.

  TRUMP’S TERRORIST FEAR-MONGERING—RAUCOUS COVER BAND FOR THE WAR PARTY

  Contrary to the spurious “morning in America” refrains of the Democratic convention, the nation is indeed heading for ruin. But that is not due to violent crimes or terrorist threats on Main Street. Instead, it is owing to the larcenous economic- policy crimes of the Imperial City—a matter that Trump’s GOP convention narrative hardly mentioned.

  There is a growing likelihood, therefore, that the Trump campaign will be entirely sidetracked from the core economic crisis of Flyover America. That’s especially owing to The Donald’s shrill remonstrations about the dangers of domestic terrorist attacks.

  By contrast, after 15 years it is abundantly evident that the horrific attack of 9/11 was a complete fluke. It could have been readily thwarted by alert intelligence work, and even then it only happened because of the complicity of Saudi Arabian officials.

  In fact, the San Diego-based Saudi handlers of 2 of the 19 terrorists received wire transfers of more than $75,000 from the Saudi ambassador’s wife. We now know from the recently released 28 pages of classified text from the Joint Inquiry that at least one of the handlers—Omar al-Bayoumi—was a Saudi agent. The report leaves little doubt that the Prince Bandar faction of the Saudi ruling family facilitated the murderous crime against 3,000 innocent Americans, which occurred on September 2001.

  Since then, by contrast, there have apparently been no foreign government facilitations of organized terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland, and mirabile dictu, there have been none.

  In fact, during the period between 9/11 and the recent lone wolf, terrorist-inspired rampages in San Bernardino and Orlando about 70 times more citizens were killed by lightening attacks on America soil than by jihadist-oriented terrorists.

  That’s right. During that 14-year interval more than 425 civilians were felled by lightning, according to the National Weather Service, but there had been just six civilians killed by terrorists. Two were killed at the El Al counter at LAX airport in 2002 and four at the Boston Marathon attacks in 2013.

  There were also five deaths from the unsolved anthrax attacks of 2001 that were not likely the work of terrorists, as well as the murderous 2009 rampage at Fort Hood and the killings at the Chattanooga military centers two years ago. But most Americans have never set foot on a military base nor do they have any risk of exposure to the special propensity for violence that may be kindled at facilities where ordinary humans are deliberately turned into killing machines.

  Yes, Orlando and San Bernardino were clearly lone wolf(s) events that an oafish CNN war storm-chaser described as “do it yourself terrorism.” But such random “inspired by” mayhem committed by mentally deranged and sociopat
hic killers like the three individuals involved in these episodes, as well as the recent killer-truck rampage in Nice, France, are not organized terrorism; they are the excrescences of the tiny margin of humanity who inhabit the dark netherworld of psychotic disorder.

  So the best thing that 324 million Americans can do about that danger is to tune out every single word that politicians have to say about it—and most especially those of Donald Trump. As a New Yorker, he was clearly traumatized by the immediacy of 9/11 and has made civic, and now political hay, by ingratiating himself to two of the most rapacious municipal monopolies in America—the New York police and firemen’s unions.

  Still, for 99.99% of Americans the risk of being killed or injured by a jihadist lone wolf is lower than being struck by lightning. And most surely it is far less than their exposure to the periodic eruption of mass killings by the full universe of homegrown psychopaths and demented malcontents who strike for other reasons and with disturbing regularity.

  Just in the last four years alone, 105 people have been killed and 100 injured by non-jihadist killing rampages in a dozen different cities from coast to coast. These included the recent events at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic and the Roseburg, Oregon campus, as well as the horrific black church murders in Charleston SC last June, the madness at Newton CT elementary school in December 2012 and the slaughter in the Aurora CO movie theatre in July 2012.

  Altogether there have been 26 incidents of non-jihadist mass killings since 9/11 including the Blacksburg, Va., campus rampage which resulted in nearly 50 deaths and injuries. About 425 Americans were killed or injured during these incidents of terror-crimes committed overwhelmingly by sick young men often harboring white supremacist or other hate-based motivations.

  Worse still, the overwhelming share of so-called terrorists plots that have been intercepted by law enforcement turn out to be FBI stings, including two-thirds of actual FBI prosecutions. Indeed, many of the cases involving no count drifters and psychotics have been so egregious that it would almost appear that the FBI is targeting the mentally ill in order to justify its massive operations and budgets.

  In justifying one of its more notorious sting operations, in fact, former FBI assistant director, and now CNN talking head, Thomas Fuentes, left nothing to the imagination:

  If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.

  Would that both kinds of actual terrorism be expunged from the land: the hateful doings of the Syed Rizwan Farooks (San Bernardino) and the demented mayhem of the Dylann Storm Roofs (South Carolina). But there is virtually nothing that Washington politicians can do about either—except most surely to not make it worse by trying to bomb, drone, invade and occupy the real jihadist kind of terrorism out of existence.

  After all, is it not evident after two decades now of jihadist style terrorism—whether quasi-organized, remotely inspired or lone wolf executed—that it is fostered by blowback from Washington’s imperial mayhem?

  Most especially, is it not evident that the terrible 21st century military violence Washington has inflicted on the Moslem populations of the Middle East is actually what breeds revenge and acts of terroristic retaliation?

  The fact is, terrorism did not suddenly sprout up a few years ago from the teachings of a 1370 year- old religion, nor from a belated discovery in struggling Middle Eastern nations that they hate America’s freedom, prosperity and materialistic culture.

  No, as I will document exhaustively, jihadist style terrorism came to America only after Washington trained and armed the mujahedeen in the 1980s, waged unprovoked war in Saudi Arabia and Mesopotamia in the 1990s and fostered the anarchy of failed Middle Eastern states—from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Libya—thereafter.

  Needless to say, the worst of Imperial Washington’s sins and crimes is its arrogant pretension that America is morally exceptional and therefore functions as the “indispensable nation” on the world stage. In fact, the American Imperium has been a bloody failure from Vietnam through Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and now Libya for the second time, among countless others.

  In that context, Donald Trump has the correct impulse—homeland security first and primarily mounted from these shores.

  But in being lured into Washington’s utterly false campaign of propaganda and lies about the threat of jihadist terror in the cities and towns of America—a campaign designed to justify the nation’s unconstitutional $80 billion spy-state apparatus at home and its vast war machine abroad—the Trump candidacy is in danger of being stealthfully co-opted by the ruling elites.

  The latter need to keep public fears of jihadist terrorism in high fever in order to justify their neocon agenda and extract from taxpayers—current and future—the horrific cost of the warfare state apparatus on which much of Imperial Washington feeds. Alas, based on the bellicose rhetoric which emanated from the Cleveland convention—such as Rudy Giuliani’s hysterical terrorist fear-mongering—the Trump campaign appears to be stumbling into its appointed role as a raucous cover band for the War Party’s more crafted headliners.

  Were Donald Trump to end-up shilling for the War Party in a losing race it would be bad enough. That’s because it would further intensify the public hysteria about terrorism that keeps the American Imperium alive—notwithstanding its blatant and chronic policy failures and its staggering cost.

  But were he to actually win the White House based on his crude anti-Muslim and terrorist fear-mongering, there is little reason to believe that The Donald would permanently check this stump speech red meat into one of the YUUGE freezers at Trump Tower. Instead, he is likely to push his police statist propensities to new extremes of unconstitutional encroachment on what remains of personal liberty in America.

  Needless to say, that would do nothing for Flyover America nor would it help to rejuvenate the nation’s ruined main street economy.

  In fact, it would lead right into the Ronald Reagan trap. Namely, the shunting of political capital into the pursuit of warfare-state fiscal resources and police state legal authorities to the complete neglect of attacking and removing the statist regulatory, fiscal, tax and monetary barriers to the revival of capitalist prosperity.

  Nevertheless, I will summarize below and describe in more detail in the chapters ahead a way forward that could break the baleful anti-capitalist and anti-democratic regime of the Washington and Wall Street elites. The Trump campaign is already taking shape in the wrong direction, of course, but a roadmap back to the true mission that history beckons of it may not be entirely superfluous.

  THE NEXT FINANCIAL CRISIS IS COMING SOON

  Unfortunately, it is too late to reverse the tidal wave of system failure that has been brewing for three decades now. It will soon end in a speculator implosion.

  Whether that crisis commences before November 8 or soon thereafter is largely immaterial. If the Trump campaign has the good sense to focus on the gathering economic storm clouds, it’s the one thing that could catalyze an out-with-the-bums uprising across Flyover America on Election Day.

  So let us reiterate our thesis even more vehemently. The idea that the American economy has recovered and is returning to an era of healthy prosperity is risible establishment propaganda. It’s the present day equivalent of the Big Lie. It’s the reason why Hillary Clinton’s campaign to validate and extend the current malefic Wall Street/Washington regime is so reprehensible.

  In fact, the natural post-recession rebound of the nation’s capitalist economy has already exhausted itself after 84 months of tepid advance. Now, the massive headwinds of towering public and private debts, faltering corporate investment and productivity, Washington-based regulato
ry and tax-barriers and the end of an unsustainable central bank fueled global credit, trade and investment boom are ushering in a prolonged era of global deflation and domestic recession.

  Indeed, the only thing that has really recovered from the epochal breakdowns of 2008–9 is the stock market averages, which are now at levels 3X the March 2009 bottom. But as we will detail in chapter 3, the market’s current lofty valuation is an utterly artificial fiction of Bubble Finance.

  In fact, the market would be heading for a hefty correction in any circumstance after being fueled for seven years with free money and massive liquidity injections by the central bank. But at a nosebleed 25X reported GAAP earnings, and after an 18% decline from their September 2014 peak already, the broad stock market is more over-valued than any time in history, including the peaks before 2008, 2000 and 1929.

  So in the face of the fast oncoming domestic recession and deepening global deflation, Wall Street is set-up for the mother of all crashes. And what makes it so wicked is that the casino gamblers have been rescued by the Fed so many times since 1987 that they have no clue that the nation’s monetary central planners are out of dry powder.

  The reasons are explained in chapter 4, but suffice it here to say that when the stampede for the exits gets underway this time, and there are no monetary firemen at the ready, sheer bedlam will quickly ensue on Wall Street.

  Likewise, there will be no possibility of a fiscal rescue, either. That’s because during 84 months of the weakest recovery in history Washington has whiffed entirely on the fiscal front. Not a single thing has been done about the structural deficit and the fast approaching insolvency of the nation’s massive social insurance system.